Nutrition
Understanding the nutritional needs of your sheep is essential to ensure your rams perform, your ewes join and recover in optimal condition, your lambs survive, your weaners thrive, and your wool cut is of high quality and quantity. Use the wide range of tools and resources available to help optimise nutrition across your flock.
Resources
Feedbase Options
Choosing the right pasture mix for the enterprise and location is essential, particularly in a more variable climate.
Ewe Nutrition
Ewe nutrition is crucial to successful lambing. Knowing what and when to feed ewes is fundamental to ewe and lamb health and survival.
Water
Healthy water systems are crucial to the Australian environment, sustaining many different plant and animal communities, agricultural enterprises and rural communities.
Click anywhere in the boxes below to expand and access the resources.
Making More From Sheep Module 8: Turn pasture into product
In this Making More From Sheep module, your business objectives will guide your tactics and strategies for matching feed supply to animal demand, managing any consequences and exploring opportunities when feed supply does not match enterprise demand.
Managing Sheep in Droughtlots
A best practice guide that highlights the purpose, benefits and experiences of woolgrowers managing sheep in confined areas during drought.
Releasing Sheep from Containment Feeding
Managing the transition from containment feeding to pasture must be done carefully to minimise the risk of any animal health issues, particularly for pregnant ewes, as well as ensuring that wool quality is not affected.
Why, when and how to supplement for success
In a recent AWI Extension NSW webinar, livestock nutritionist and producer Nicole Logg from NSW provided woolgrowers with advice on the effective use of supplements to improve sheep productivity.
Transitioning from Containment to Pasture
Containment feeding can be a useful strategy during dry times. However, once sufficient rainfall has been received to initiate pasture growth, managing the transition from containment areas to pasture must be done carefully
Tools
Feed budgeting in the dry period is inherently difficult due to the variability of the quality of dry feed and the value of the subsequent portion that the sheep choose to eat. The decline rate and pasture height differences between different pasture systems also affect the amount of energy sheep can gain from dry pasture. There are, however, some 'rules of thumb' that can be used as a guide for supplementary feeding in the dry period.
The general steps for feed budgeting at any time of the year are;
- What they can eat - What they require = surplus or deficit of energy
- If they aren't getting enough energy then how much to feed to meet the requirement.
It is important to remember too, that the energy requirements of sheep vary with the feed they are eating, the amount of grazing they are doing to find the feed and their current status of nutrition and whether they are dry, pregnant or lactating.
The Feed On Offer (FOO) library allows users to estimate FOO and nutritive value of grazed pastures. Animal performance is determined by the quality and quantity of pasture available and when known, better decisions can be made on allocation of stock to paddocks or supplementary feeding.
Video Resources
AWI Extension NSW Webinar - Winter Sheep Nutrition
AWI Extension NSW Webinar - Supplements for Success
